Another great suggestion from Andy! The perfect MovieNight season wrap-up flick. A good time was had by all, except possibly those of you who had to wait a bit for a drink! Great performances from Melanie, Jeff, and Ray.

Congratulations to Tory, our season raffle prize winner! Also to Amaliya, Charlie (x2!), and Suzette, who picked up the other prizes. Stay tuned for further news, and have a GREAT summer!

This one was even better the second time around (Thursday night was my second viewing in as many weeks). The spine-tingling sense of impending horror was somehow undeminished, and the story was rich with nuanced details that I had overlooked the first time. Of course, many films are just plain better when seen at MovieNight…

Yes, we missed seeing those of you who absolutely hate ghost stories, and scary movies in general… but this one just needed to be shown. The seats you might have occupied were quickly filled, and then some.

According to Chris, “Eat Drink Man Woman” was the sentence that Arnold Swarzenegger used when asking Maria Shriver on their first date. Hmmm.

The movie, as opposed to Arnold’s apocryphal sentence, is great bit of classic film-making; Lee starts off by coloring in his blank canvas with lush detail and character-building, to the extent that one begins to wonder whether anything much is going to happen. It’s just at that point when things do begin to happen, and happen aplenty. Since we’ve taken a bit of time to get to know the characters, we now have a vested interest in what happens to them.

A poignant family drama with plenty of humor (and a great twist at the end!), filmed in a beautifully classic style, this was a great MovieNight choice. Hats off to Andy once more… he can add this one to his impressive list of suggestions !

It was nice to get some rare personal-sofa-time during the screening of this darkly brilliant debut feature from Jane Campion. And… how about that Sangria!

The one thing that disappointed though, in my [humble] opinion: not a single good-looking person in the movie. As New Yorkers, we naturally expect a bit of above-averageness. Just one would have been nice. Even the kid had a hideous haircut (inspired by the late Steve Irwin, no doubt). I guess Abbey Cornish was way too young, and neither of the Minogue sisters were post-op? Un-lucky, lucky, lucky.

There must be at least a couple of attractive Australians no? Surely not all the convicts originally shipped out to help populate the territory were bad-looking? Or was that their crime against British society? We might just be on to something here… stay tuned.

But, I digress…

It’s funny… the general consensus seems to be that Polish films don’t draw big crowds at MovieNight. What a shame for those who missed this gorgeous film. What a treat for those who didn’t. The high-contrast black and white cinematography of “Time to Die” and it’s examination of a life nearing its end reminded more than a few of us of Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries”. And “Philadelphia” the dog… simply amazing. (props to her trainer, of course!)

You have another chance to see this film (and you really should see it) at its first official USA screening (MovieNight is of course, unofficial in this case), on Saturday, May 10th, at the Anthology Film Archives, as part of the upcoming New York Polish Film Festival. Details at nypff.com

Once again, thanks so much to Bolek P. for the suggestion, and the delicious mead which was enjoyed aprez-MN by the lucky ones!

Thanks to everyone who attended the first official North American screening of “Island in the Sky”. It only took twenty years to show it! In case you’re interested in the back story (or at least some of it)… in the spring of 1987, I found myself in need of some good old fashioned escapism, due to the pressures of my life and career. I asked my good friend and neighbor, Anthony Souter, if he would be interested in traveling to China with me to “make a film”. Fortunately, he was thrilled at the prospect, and after a few months of getting ourselves organized (we thought), we set out for Asia… first stop: Hong Kong. We stayed for a few days, acclimatizing ourselves to the steamy environment, and picking up some bargains in sound recording stuff.

We took an overnight boat trip to Guangzhou (at that time still called Canton), and while waiting for the youth hostel to open, got talking to some fellow travelers, who had just returned from Tibet. This was exciting news indeed, since we had been informed that travel in Tibet was off-limits. Thinking that the best way to get there would be to go as far by train as we could, we set off on a 33-hour train journey to Chengdu, in the western province of Sechuan. While this experience, and the unfamiliar atmosphere of Chengdu were unforgettable, it seemed like we might have chosen a better way to get to Tibet. Recent rains had made the roads pretty much impassable. 22 days in a [Jeep] was one of the options we faced. (Looking back on this now, had we the time, that would have been pretty spectacular!)

We decided to bite the bullet, and get on a China Airways flight to Lhasa. Landing in Tibet was incredible, not least of all because we had survived a flight on China Airways, a company not famous for its impeccable safety record. We found ourselves in a beautiful highland landscape with crystal blue skies. It was, we had been told, imperative that we “take it easy” for a few days, to get ourselves used to the altitude (about 3500 meters above sea level). We got ourselves checked into a dorm room at the Yak Hotel, in downtown Lhasa, and “took it easy” for as long as we could bear. A few hours later, we ventured out into the center of the old town, and got caught up in the evening ritual of walking around the main monastery; the Jokhang, three times. It was like being on a different planet, yet somehow really comfortable.

As the days passed, our excursions became more and more ambitious, the longest being a 3-day trip to a horse-trading/racing, match-making festival that the Chinese were allowing the Tibetans to celebrate for the first time in almost thirty years. We filmed often, and I took still images as well. We had packed our backpacks to the brim with super-8 film, which we shot at 9 frames per second (mostly) to save film. When asked by our fellow travelers what we were doing, we told a little “story” about how we were shooting a documentary for Channel Four, in the UK. It was handy to have an answer, and made us feel like we had a legitimate project – a discipline we could stick to.

The irony is that we got back to England in the autumn of 1987 and sold the project to Channel Four! The broadcast premier of “Island in the Sky” took place in June, 1988.